That’s painting it in the most charitable light. For the first months of the pandemic, they specifically said “don’t wear a mask because current evidence is that it does not spread airborne and most likely infection vector is contact with a contaminated surface, don’t bother with masks but wash hands and scrub surfaces.” It wasn’t about asymptomatic cases not being transmitted in the air but in general about the coronavirus not being “primarily” transmitted via the air, which would have been patently false even at the time, except for the “primarily” weasel word. (You can look at the archive.org snapshots for the CDC website.)

As a scientist, my answer to “should we wear masks?” wouldn’t have been to deflect to contaminated surfaces - even setting aside that subsequent research showed that to be largely a non-issue.